Top5 mobile gaming launches special: GameMakers x 2.5 gamers live crossover

this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast 2 and a half Gamers sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization jobs we are definitely not discussing the latest industry news but having so much fun let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously welcome everybody you have myself Joseph Kim and Monte lunch and we are going to be talking about the five five biggest game mobile game launches of the past year there's a lot of talk about ID F deprecation mobile gaming is dead everything's over can't be successful and yet we've got five games that we're going to look at honai star rail survivor.io Monopoly go Marvel snap and Frozen Frozen City so these are the five games that we have looked at and belied

to be the five biggest launches over the past year before we dive in I know we're going to be broadcasting this to both of our audiences game makers and to two and a half Gamers but for the game makers audience who doesn't know who you are mate and why you are the best person in the world in the world to speak about mobile game launches in UA uh maybe take a minute about who you are okay let's let's take a minute I've been in the industry 10 years working different companies you consultant soft Ling global global around 35 games in the past years spending around like 40 million is profitably profitably and and I'm the host of the no [ __ ] gaming podcast two and a half Gamers great to be here now you should introduced to the audience of Two and a Half Gamers we had you on yes so if anyone saw the two and a half Gamers episode with me i' if you haven't go check it out but I'm

basically mainly known for being the handsomest executive in the games industry besides that besides that we we don't need to talk about that besides that um I am the CEO of a FPS gaming studio uh mobile first based out of India uh Leela games and do stuff on game makers create some content that I think is interesting that is important critical information to give you that Alpha that edge and why we are going to be how you can be successful in the market so now we are going to look at the these five big game launches and we've got some we've got some numbers should we maybe we can go over the numbers and dive into these detail you this okay let's Kai or you want to go through the so yeah maybe what I could do is uh I'll go over the numbers and then maybe splice in what in in post we I can kind of show some of the stuff but first game

honai star rail a publisher is hoyo verse formerly known as uh Mi hoyo although I think the way to pronounce it everyone pronounces it differently and the Chinese pronounce it differently okay this was launched April 26 of this year so far cumulative downloads 54.6 million downloads has done about 180 million in cumulative net revenue this is net and so you know my opinion this is you know we we'll talk about it more depth but this has been like a huge winner huge game massive you know kind of success success but if you have 4,000 employees there's no other no other way there's no other way just have to be a success and we we'll talk about this the other game that I'm surprised about survivor.io really um habby August 11th 2022 so it launched a little bit earlier towards the end of last year it was a huge launch last year huge huge launch

so you might know hobby from archero yep and this is another game they actually launched I think like two other games last year right but these are definitely like the biggest success they launched recently snaker but not even close to the success of Survivor iio so close to 69 million cumulative downloads right now and about 268 million in cumulative net revenue so which is iip only and there is definitely an additional revenue on ads yes so this this is making a [ __ ] ton of money it's it's raining dollars for survivor.io so like good for those guys it's really it's really a great game as well and like a huge success next is Monopoly go by scopely launched April 12th of this year um so the not a long time ago not a long time ago not not in a long time AG yeah yeah cumul have downloads so far about 22 and a. half million um in accumulative Revenue about 28 million in

that Revenue this is all from data. data I think we've also looked at some of the sensor Tower data yeah some discrepancies yeah there some differencies yeah sometimes small sometimes big but you know we can talk about that as well uh next Marvel snap um published by nerse um and coincidentally I just came from speaking to the newers guys so so out of the Tik Tok office in Culver City so literally just came came from Meeting those guys can provide a few additional insights October 18th 2022 launch so late last year 17.2 million cative downloads and about 79 million in cumulative Revenue so okay no ads there no ads there no ad revenue is is what Monte means and finally Frozen City now I played all of these games I gotta say the game that I am impressed by and this is not just because by the way there is a fun plus angle right oh okay Century kind of spun out of fun there's some

relationships there there's some shared people there but I was actually quite impressed playing this game we'll talk about it December 26th of last year launch so odd timing I yeah interesting time maybe you can like when we get there I think you should speak about like you know December launch December yeah and that timing about 17 18 million downloads and cumulative accumulative download so far and about 26 million in cumulative revenue and similarly you there are some adss right significant amount of money on ads as well it's working quite well and I mean there are some um estimations that Felix done when we talked about the game before and yeah I think it's like 30 40% on top of what we see it's additional Revenue ads ad Revenue wow not bad yeah not bad okay so maybe we can dive in starting with honai star rail now maybe before we in we can provide a little bit

of context in terms of mihoyo as well so in my opinion this is a company with a very differentiated strategy right so these guys are big Ballers they're like they they are coming in hard and strong and they have a significant Mo because for example when we think about gench and impact yeah they spent a hundred million in development reportedly okay and they're spending 200 million live Ops a year so like when you think about the kinds of Studios that can compete against this strategy of super high production value right so you got massive production value and then you're launching a game with a free- to-play model it's it's a very different model from what from anyone else that I'm seeing and the word on the street and you know I'm one of the few people who actually hears the from China oh nice with my my Chinese conne

but reportedly kind of like the uh the strategy behind hoyo verse is actually to try to become like the Nintendo okay of freet to-play mobile interesting so basically like you can just go down the line of all of the G like you know of course Zelda genin but like you know other games so you can expect the future game strategy of ho overse to be we're going to look at the most successful titles on Nintendo on switch and then we're going to try to create a freetop playay mobile crossplatform version of that and by the way we have our massive Chinese team that works 996 and we have the massive budget okay try to mess with us just try to follow us we're gonna [ __ ] you up that's kind of the Str gonna happen Okay no honestly if you have that amount of employees it's just like it's hard to compete right and the the the quality bar for genin and Hong just like yeah it's it's

amazing so right now when we look at hoo verse two top worldwide grossing games right genin and this and they they Behind These two games they are now one of the top five Publishers oh yeah in the world and um just looking at let's see just checking their stats here we can see so downloads have actually dropped off quite a lot uh yeah I mean of course well on a on a relative but still we're looking at 100,000 yeah 120 a day which is for any other company that pretty huge that's pretty huge but the amount of revenues they're making on a daily basis revenue is is kind of holding we're seeing some spikes and what was what the hell was this I'm pretty sure that was a liveops event or or anything well I'm I think yakob mentioned there was like a new character introduced in the game okay and it's like

that was probably what happened around May miday yeah miday that that really drove the revenue um I think that I didn't I didn't check um RPD here but I I assumed that you know if we're talking about again the roof yeah it's probably going up up and to the right um was there anything you saw from like um you know a marketing perspective that that you think that they did different l or what what was your take on how they launched how they launched uh I was expecting uh I wasn't expecting that honestly they would spend anything because well it's just big game they have gin but they're actually spending I have no idea how much money but I would expect a a lot sure but then they have uh I mean China is top one market right then there's uh Japan and then there's us on the third third spot and there are the The Usual Suspects

which is uh the Google Facebooks and all of the all of the fun stuff then they have the the mle which is I mean that's like a hot [ __ ] nowadays in the UA space Ian I have no idea like what they are doing but apparently and I I see it on my side as well like that Uhn and then DSP is working super well on different games so you're actually buying from different networks anyway can so for our audience and especially mine they're not as tuned into to UA So when you say a DSP can you explain to the audience what you mean by that let's call it a a programmatic buying and um let's simplify things so they have an inventory of different ad networks like uh here we can see they're buying from uh Unity at colang and others but they have their own um mechanism and algorithms for like B for bidding so and then you can just deploy a lots of budgets into it's amazing how little Facebook is now it's very little I know

right so it's very very little and uh I mean if we had this conversation like two or three years ago yeah Facebook would be top one then Google and then everything else Apple you got your way you accomplished mission accomplish you guys destroyed Facebook oh my God yeah it's I mean it's uh on Android it's just so competitive on Facebook it just doesn't work that much on I it's slightly different story but still I mean you have all the other all networks but if you are you know spending 200 million on liveops then you need to spend across the like all of the channels basically and now we actually talked about the night cross that that you mentioned uh with yakob okay and uh and even like they had this like offline Marketing in in South Korea quite heavily so I'm pretty sure like these guys have their own ways of how to Market their game in uh in these areas but honestly they still yeah the country distribution is like I said like us then

Japan Korea I mean we don't see the China in these tools that much but I'm pretty sure like that's like huge huge huge huge and they're look so they're creatives and uh we can we can show it some some things in the in the post production as well it's just so beautiful I mean right so in in other games like a lot of other like um strategies on the creative side like fake ads misting guys like they these guys that they don't need to do that at all they just use all the nice characters the game play it feels so beautiful right and maybe for our audience the other important thing to note is that a lot of the data services whether it's data. or sensor Tower will not track like the alternative app stores in China and for a game like some of these top Chinese games are not only dominating like some of the charts but they're also not counting the revenue from the alternative app stores so Mone is huge we don't have the PC uh

Revenue as well right right and I'm pretty sure like this is like also like super right right right so long story long story short it's good to be hoo verse oh yeah 100% it's good to have 4,000 employees if you can afford that then of course like you can dominate the whole world basically yeah and now like you see on the on the revenue as soon as they and if I can't imagine if they can spend more money on the liveos but I'm pretty sure they will eventually and they should just go up right right right and with this type of monetization I mean the UA is like basically easy but with this type of budget I guess it's just like almost the shotgun approach like you just you would just be everywhere like like mobile strike and machine Zone back in the days you just open up the fridge and then there's Arnold fors instead like this is going to be characters from uh well I guess the whole hoob now yeah it's nice so should we move on or yeah let's let's move on

because now like this feels like very out of the reach for like a lot of companies but it's always good to talk about like the huge successes like it's it's good for like motivation maybe the second game we should talk about let's see here we probably oh Monopoly go okay most controversial controversy controversy everywhere is mon how well is Monopoly go doing okay so now yeah we can if we look at the numbers okay by the Numbers it appears that Monopoly go is doing really well so if you look at for example the downloads it's they have not dropped off yeah none at all yeah they're going going going and the revenue is you can see the early Revenue stacking and it's it's going up like this yeah now the question though is okay these guys are spending a lot yes that's the word on the street like they're spending quite a lot of money on on a daas now now also the word on the street is that the internal

people from scopely are saying this is a great game this game is monetizing like crazy but okay so here's my concern okay let's my concern is like the amount and scale that it seems like they're spending so like I can understand some people going hard during launch because you want to so and there's different philosophies but one philosophy is you want to try and get launch velocity you you want to get a lot of people behind the game especially during that kind of golden cohort phase but they haven't done that and eased off and said okay let's see where these arpus are getting to let's see how this game scales it seems like they're just yeah P to the metal yeah we're going guys we're rolling and it's like okay but so so my concern is this okay so they they were they were in soft launch for a while so I assume they kind of understand what the shape of their RPO curve looks like but when you go

hard when you go much higher scale and when you go to you know focus on a a Geo like the us more more specifically like will they be able to maintain um that arpu growth over time you know how how well because here's here's what I know of scopely these guys are some aggressive marketers right they're aggressive of growth guys and they go a lot off of you know basically you it's common to go off of like D3 D7 row as um I think they call they call D7 rows D7 recoup okay but what often happens is you you basically can sometimes like pick your budget you tell me like I'm not the expert you're the expert right so sometimes you'll look at your your D7 to Lifetime and you'll you'll assume a ratio yeah and they may have done that based upon on other Goos and based upon um the initial like

the initial so the initial d7s that they're seeing right now they may they may you're assuming that that continues to grow and I think that they're being very aggressive also you got to think about strategically with Savvy Savvy wants to be a number one publisher Sav wants to have like strategically they want to go so I feel like you've got you've a company known for for aggressive push in the past who may not have been profitable in the past yeah nobody know on the street stre knows um until Co um and and then You' you've got a buyer in an operator now through Savvy who just wants to push with a [ __ ] ton of money and who don't really care about profitability yeah so I guess what I'm not so sure about is I think they're making a lot of assumptions on their D7

to Lifetime and they're pushing really hard yeah but this may not actually be super profitable we don't know I'm not look I'm not saying we don't know we don't I'm not saying looks like yeah but it looks like it's it's not there yet they're losing money now yeah oh yeah but and they're assuming they're G to get paid back but also the other thing that they could be doing and where this might make sense is I don't know if you remember the old like Japanese strategy especially when you had the old ccg goach based games like Rage of Bah back in those days but they used to build their UA models not only off of a single game but they would they would basically have a UA UA model against a portfolio Okay so it's based on like all the games and then you have like LTV of the the whole portfolio LTV of the user based upon hey you know we're going to get this user and then he will spending across all games and for the Japanese had this model where it's like okay after a certain point in the lifetime of

a player they're going to push him to this other Goa ccg game and then another got and they may they may model two to three games out okay so anyway that's why I'm a little bit skeptical that you can't be comparing Monopoly go Apples to Apples against other game launches almost probably no and that this the calling Monopoly go a success right now based upon what I know historically it's very early to say it's it's success I mean it the game grows like crazy that's true the revenue grows like crazy but also if you spend Chan of money on a daily basis which more of the streets it's Millions nobody knows nobody knows if it's if that's true yeah then it's going to be very hard to actually recoup that money and even if you're are looking at what like a year maybe two years like yeah it's like the old Social Casino guys were like anywhere from 18 to 24 months mon right at one point in

time and this this category even if you have the Monopoly IP I mean it's not cheap there there's gonna be a r share here and true yeah yeah of course guessing 20% guessing guing so yeah you need to make like 20% more to actually be profitable at some point in the future with like really high cpis in this category and you have 300,000 daily installs and there's like one is still like us which makes me wonder like that's that's a lot of money right now maybe the the other game we could talk about or think about is like it it is very similar to coin Master right so if it can get coin Master arpu then I think it should be okay it should should do well then the question is is that so this is this is a question that you know and I haven't played Monopoly go long enough or well enough and I don't know that well enough but

you know then I think if you're really interested in understanding how well Monopoly will fa over time then it would be like okay what are the differences between a CO coin Master versus a monopoly go yeah and doesn't have the ability to reach the kind of monetization characteristics of of a coin Master oh have you guys deconstructed this as part of T half we are planning to actually okay so this this is what you should be asking this no no no because yeah we have talked about preparations for this and then the comparison to coin Master is actually that what we talked about right and how we should think about it because yeah people compare it to coin Master quite heavily but I'm not sure so sure if it's uh anywhere close there of course like there are similar there are there are different games like di streams and like there are different iterations yakob already talked about it in in in his LinkedIn post yeah I guess it's fair but in terms of the US strategy now like they're pushing so hard it I'm most probably sure that they will need to

like slow down very very soon because it's not sustainable I mean the revenue grows but it's going to peek very very soon I me I'm guessing like two weeks from now okay two weeks from now and then then we will uh de construct like okay so now like yeah this is time because I mean it's super aggressive honestly right I wasn't expecting this type of Revenue growth and um the 300K downloads per day it's just like since they launched it's flat like you said and yeah well I'm not yeah I even if you compare the the arur from soft Lounge it's different scale yeah it's very different scale so it's not like apples like I mean the shape might be the same but honestly with this type of budget on a daily basis it it might not be even two years right and the other thing for our audience just just like be you know UA 101 and the expert I'm not the expert but one of the things a

concept for product managers Executives to understand is like if you were to think of a um so I'll talk into this camera so if you think about a a two-dimensional graph where you have like volume on the x-axis and cost CPI on the y- axis what happens is you push volume is that you often get kind of an exponential curve at some point there there's going to be a Bend yeah uh in in in terms of the graph at certain scales of volume and so the question is they have not operated at this scale before they they were sitting in in soft for a while so a lot of the assumptions that you make as you start to scale up start to break down and that's the risk is that you know and that's also one of the reasons why some people will push the first two weeks and then ease off and say okay let's see where we're at these guys are not ease off type of guys they're like boom we're going and also uh you mentioned the golden cohort golden coh is always better yes in terms

of like all the kpis lowest CPI and the highest LTV which Honestly by now it's it's over already and and so some sometimes what people will do is they'll take the golden cohart kpis and extrapolate forward oh yeah yeah yeah it looks pretty good yeah it looks pretty good let's push even more and then after three months you wake up like oh [ __ ] yeah and when you when you've got like a 18 to 24 month payback period that original guy who built that aggressive model not he's already G yeah he's he's already gone from the company like oh well you can blame this honestly like this is very um risky but again like if you have a a new buyer well the buyer of the company and then you have sh enough money and there strategic reasons and we don't have the full context of course and even if they're not profitable then you know somebody comes back and builds them all that oh yeah we we're always want to do the portfolio strategy right we're B banking on getting you know the Japanese comp I heard on podcast before let's

this but no yeah it's it's risky let's let's see what happens but yeah I'm not a very big fan of this type of like Splash um uh Global launches anymore I mean of course if you have the money but you gradually spending and seeing like how the cohorts major right one week two weeks three weeks and then you can actually scale yeah so one of the things that I have talked about before is kind of this notion about moving from the previous zero interest rate Market environment age of access into age of efficiency now if if you're trying to buy efficiently this is not the same not because people asking like oh well like they are doing so well I like how do you know they're doing so well but you know like look the revenue is is increasing yeah yes but do you know how much they spend oh well we don't but we assume like it's going well like fine yeah so

once you you test for scale once you see the longer term arpo curve then you can go back and say ah yeah we made the right decision and again I don't think either of us are saying they made the wrong decision of course but we're saying they're making a hella aggressive decision yeah and and there's some risk there and risk bets for for the future future Avenues and well profits in particular all right the next big launch my survivor.io now this is a game you I you know I found it fun I thought it very interesting how you take this you know replayable game mechanic you're adding a lot lot of long-term progression to that game which is clever but you know can you speak to what how how do you think they're doing or so they're yeah they're doing quite well I mean yob could talk about this for for years he loves the like unfolding gam playay all the fun game design stuff like how you actually progress with the game and then they are showcasing unfolding a new features for you which

monetize like hell but now uh well so they they made this like huge Splash lounge and they were spending like crazy there were also some like words on the street that they spent quite extensively on TI Tok okay in the first uh few few weeks and months and um they used even like a different product which was called like I mean it's still called like top view it's like almost like a branding campaign yeah of course if you if you put that um in place Tik Tok kind of helps you to be on the first position like everywhere okay so that worked quite well and then there was like there were these days like look so the the revenue like kind of hold and steady with typical event spikes and they were just on one million a day Revenue in like what like four or five days since the global wow and it's like a combination of inaps and ads ads revenue and it's like 5050 almost split right so everything we see here which is where is

itth here which is now well you had it somewhere else we had it here so it's like 270 million and then I think you can add another 200 million to that revenue on the on the ads Revenue side yeah which is crazy it's super super good in terms of the like implementation in the game you just want to watch those ads it's like six or seven placements and they're uncovering like different other placements beautifully then yeah so don't sleep on survivor.io guys like people are are talking about certain games as being the best game out there but it's like we got some we got some strong launches here you know I think well one clearly there's there's honai which is in one Universe yeah it's different and then there's everybody else everybody else yeah there's everybody else of course but these guys from hubby they like also pretty aggressive in terms of

uh games and then monetization they have this like meta game framework that they now apply to all of their games yeah but this one it's especially working well because of the the whole like marketability and theme it's just packed into this like almost like hyper casual visual style right which is also we are going to talk about the Frozen city which is very similar but this is slightly different they're using like these like hordes of different Monsters Everywhere is just super overwhelming in the creatives now almost all midcore games using their creative strategy now fake ads fake as [ __ ] but taken from Survivor iio because they created something that works really well right and for our audience just so you know in terms of habby itself this makes sense because if you think about where they came from right so they actually came from cheetah cheetah mobile yeah yeah so these guys were basically add publishing like hyper casual experts

work for a while the word on the street was they were actually already kind of working on the side on this you know that's how it works man so they kind of knew they were gonna be successful even before they left that's word on the street rumor again rumor conjecture speculation but um yeah I I think that helps you understand that this is a type of company if we talk about strategy understanding the market ability and the potential to get growth for a game even before you make the game that's where the expertise comes from and by the way no not to take anything away from archero or from survivor.io but what I'm saying is like they also have that in their DNA yeah yeah 100% And also like Archer was a big success like genre defining basically now they did it again with Survivor and like it's even like better and way way better than our CH was ever like in terms of downloads and revenues and can you speak on like in terms of their marketing mix

or things that theyve done you mentioned Tik Tok was there anything else that kind of stood out to you there was really big um Splash on Tik Tok uh mainly on IOS and Android but mainly on iOS like now they're spending almost everything on iOS it's like very big amount of budgets and even if you look at like so they're spending on iOS despite exact exactly exactly exactly so iOS is De they're still spending like crazy on I and it's working quite well for them apparently based on the revenues and honestly the mix is just very easy to understand it's Tik Tok Google Facebook appin appin actually when we discussed different game launches in the last six months app was always like top free they're also doing something very interesting in terms of performance it it improved so heavily but here I think uh what's most important in in on iOS they're doing

different mixes in terms of GEOS so you have the the South Korea Japan and and Asia and then they have the US yeah so they are also big not only in us but also in in Asian countries which makes a lot of a lot of sense and also like revenue and we don't we don't have the China the revenues as well and they're based on they're de developers from China so they know their ship they know what they are doing in that market and in terms of uh uh before you move on like as far as the mix there so so whether the different ad networks and things like that um where do you see the mix what are the top performing ad networks for a game like this for game like this it's uh it's Google way more than Facebook I mean like like you said Facebook is just minimum you want to have it in the mix but it's not the top spender it's usually Google Tik Tok and I see uping these days so those are top three if you have ad monetized game it's definitely Ely appin because of the Adas

campaign so if you mediate with Max uh their mediation platform then you can you can run Adas campaigns which is basically targeting Wells but on the ad Revenue side then you have Google which you can also run Adas campaigns and unity as well you can also addiz campaign so in this like this is I I joked around this game is just basically a UA manager web dream because you have we have inaps and you have ads as well and if it's 50/50 you can use so many options inab revenues like value optimization so Target veils and then addas campaigns and you can even use like up even optimized campaigns like any engagement event so but you got to use max you don't need to use max okay it's uh you you just if you have a healthy split on the outsite versus inaps you can use whatever mediation you have SE and it's it's no longer dangerous to use app L they are trying to get rid of their games business so I think they've learned their lesson I I think so maybe

guys you can you can dip your toes into the into the app Lov and Waters again yeah yeah honestly it's for me it's been like one of the best performing channels in the last six months so it's I mean they they've always performed well it was just the question was were they a little bit Shady right but no like this was like one of the biggest launches for sure like for last uh last year and it's still making [ __ ] outon of money honestly so they shifted the strategy on the creative side from from using all only the uh the game play oriented videos to actually something which is really interesting right and they used it for snake and now they implemented it back to Survivor IO which is using actually AI people in the ugc creative so instead of using real humans they use AI I used it as well and it's just outperforming really by far okay and it's easy to produce you you can create like 10 iterations out of nowhere in like an

hour okay it's perfect it was so funny because I I know those people are made by I because I use it but people they don't know like I I talked about and there's like I wouldn't say it just like so natural like perfect really great like guys on the UA side and monetization side chef really seriously heads off nice heads off all right Marvel snap oh man okay yeah so um how do we start on Marvel snap so by the way I just saw these guys so I don't want to say anything mean because I like them yeah but okay so let let's you saw the new guys not the the yeah yeah yeah no not the second just to be clear on the publishing side but it's the publishing side where there's let's just be honest okay so we you know we're kind of insiders in the industry so we hear a lot from a lot of different people um the game itself obviously is is a

good game um is actually kind of interesting so just just the setup in terms of more information for our audience about snap is that so they were funded by net EAS I think they raised 30 million to make even more I think it's 50 is it more okay the initial funding was 30 okay okay so I I don't know if the other 20 additional 20 came from non- net e or if it's all net e uh interestingly you never have have a situation like this where you have two different Chinese companies one does investment and one does the publishing it's unusual yeah so for um for bite dance new verse to come in and do the publishing is unusual um but I would say that like the word on the street is like actually how well I mean great for second dinner you know and by the way these are like the ex blizzard Hearthstone guys so you know they know the ccg category pretty well but the word internally amongst a lot of people and you know I can say this because

people are tweeting about it and things like that is like that the game economically has not been great for newers now great for second dinner and so you know on the one hand it's like okay great nver really will push the [ __ ] out of a game great right um but then if we're talking about the five best launches over the past year can we consider Marvel snap to be one of the best launches I would say one of the biggest launch sure it's one of the biggest launches but like from an economics perspective you know we would probably just like I would kind of discount Monopoly go right now yeah I probably discount Marvel snap as a economically successful big launch for now um but I don't know what do you think what's your take yeah so thing is uh newers is still spending a second de of money so so they are actually operating that budget and you know the lounge was when I was looking at at the at the game at the time when they they launched it it felt like a Playbook from

2013 or 14 just like huge amounts of like um installs from everywhere honestly I saw Ben broad on Facebook like 10 times a day uh if you think about it what are you doing on Facebook okay okay true okay true Twitter as well by the way Twitter as well and Instagram as well and then no LinkedIn so I say that's that's my main social social media okay but I saw him like multiple times a day if you think about it the frequency of that ad it's just like crazy high so they they hired an old MZ guy that exactly they must have hired an old MZ guy I remember what we did for Game of War 2013 and that was I think like that wasn't like very efficient on the first place so that's why I think like the economic didn't work that well because if you do these type of like big splash gobl Lanes you are you can't do it like we think uh Monopoly go does it because

I think like they're pushing on inup side or like up even optimized purchase campaigns value optimized campaigns just because the ARP is like increasing like crazy right in here it was like most probably not that down the funnel it was mainly like installs and if you run these type of campaigns you can't expect a lot of money back yeah and by the way Mar is expensive just so people know you mean in terms of Ip and like IP on IP licensing sign so you're talking about one of the most you know economically well not now the Marvel guy well [ __ ] it I mean look it's it's expensive I'll put it that way expensive don't get mad at me Marvel guys but you're not showing me much love anyway so okay but we mentioned that they made like 80 million based on the data AI since the global

launch so words Industries they they spend a lot of money during the first two weeks on the global launch which maybe in like tens of millions yeah and I mean I would say just based upon like I haven't played a lot of snap but I played a lot of snap and and we you know there there's people in our community that have played a lot but clearly the monetization is light yeah oh yeah yeah 100% 100% it's very light it's like no gacha it's they tried got yeah there was a back back yeah so you know like RoR also had a different monetization then they put gacha in the in the game and then suddenly instead of making 10 or 20K a day they just started making 200 or 300,000 per day immediately sted all all all Community but then you know and when you say that they used the old 2013 Playbook so they did do some things like you know Sam Jackson video things like that but it was only like for like short period of time and it was only live on Tik Tok I mean if you have this type of

video you just show it everywhere okay everywhere there like there is am Chavez in the in the videos which is obviously like after Doctor Strange movie everybody knows her but she's not very popular Marvel character you have hul you have Spider-Man you have Iron Man like Thor like why don't you use that right it's just it's just crazy obviously I was really wrong about um using or like talking about uh using bang Broad in the video because I've heard that it's performing quite well because he's a very strong um Personnel in the yeah person in the ccg community in the ccg community okay but I know like if you want to scale nobody cares that's what well nobody cares nobody cares but in like in the CG Community apparently this works quite well and honestly it's not the very big market right yeah so if you want to just yeah double down on that most probably you want to use bu that I don't know for scaling for

scaling most probably no but if you yeah if you want to capture like the whole Niche most probably yes I think this is a very interesting space just because historically it's been very concentrated right it was like Hearthstone and Yu-Gi-Oh on mobile in yeah and that's it and that's it and you Riot with Legends of room Terra I mean yeah I I mean that game's not doing well I that's my guess is that it's not doing well yeah I think I was I was looking into and like Marvel SN out of uh all these like mobile versions was doing quite okay in terms of like Revenue per download and like how the curve increased over time okay but that's mobile you have PC and and others and also like hardson was on PC first and then they launched M it's like not comparing Apples to Apples anyway but in terms of yeah the the UA and and everything like during the global launch why I think it was like a big splash because it was just like and then it decreased quite heavily after three

weeks and there there was like Facebook Google ad networks and everything just was stopped and then came back to Google and Facebook and you can't scale with two channels I mean if you look at the Monopoly go or Survivor like they're spending everywhere no it's just yeah now they they scaled back quite quite heavily yeah I I think the um the way that I would probably think about the longer term success of snap is okay now you've got an in you know one big investor plus developer plus separate publisher relation it's all the and you got Marvel up in there as well and then you've got like um clearly second dinner has already publicly stated that they're they're they're they're more jazzed about their next game right yeah yeah so then like how much attention effort energy is going to continue to go into snap is my question and were they incentivized properly to

push well I mean I don't know I this is all like these are the questions though yeah H think if you have the like this type of scale of the game there still like what like almost 600,000 Theus I think okay which is not bad it's not bad and they're making like half a million based on the the external tools on the daily basis which again like pretty good if you if you compare it to to other games like a lot of companies would like like those those numbers sure without the third parties and all obviously so but I think it's still like if they can improve on the monetization which I think they've done quite recently because I'm playing the game they introduced some like early special offers and they increased like the early monetization by a lot okay so I guess like they're pretty skillful and this is still like very much big learning experience for them like how they can move the needle and if they can move the needle here I mean impul probably can move the need on the next game like easily but I guess like there's going to be uh a different

selection process for publisher or whatever we'll see we'll see we'll see just pure speculation yeah we don't know we don't know all right so our last game yes Frozen City I love this game and you know what I actually the interesting thing is is that um I had a game design um mainly driven by a friend of mine um that was very similar to this and I'm excited just because because it worked but like the production value what they did kind of mixing city building with Idol I thought it was really cool I'm really glad to see that this game is doing well and I think you're gonna see the arpo curve on this thing just you know I I think you know for me the the numbers if if we just look at the pure numbers it doesn't yeah it Compares okay yeah it's like 26 million revenue and then 17 million d cumulative but I actually think longer

term this this this uh this has got some legs I think we're also going to see other games that try to mimic this and maybe another game there's already like few few games in development it's like take on the Frozen City yeah and I think another game that can potentially or or frozen City that iterates to um being able to drive higher monetization because you know you're you're mixing collection you're mixing you know Saga based uh city building um and you've also got like the heroes aspect in around the heroes so they have also like a battle element in there so you can you can take your heroes or whatever and actually battle right right like few actually few games within one game basically yeah and so those additional vectors of progression and potential areas for monetization vectors and systems here we are I thought because yakob is always talking about system and vectors this thing has great core no like you got a lot to work with with the game so I actually am very very positive on this game you know I am

a little bit biased having come from having previously worked at fun plus and you know um but uh you know I I actually think this is this is quite a strong launch what what do they do on the marketing side it's it's a very strong launch I mean they they were very strong on the on the app side I mean look so if you have idle game and you have odd monetization the top one channel for is just up loving it's going to work so well and this is what worked well for for them as well where where we have it here Frozen City I mean even now they're still running I mean they're again pretty big on iOS uh and what we need to make uh mention is the 30 or 40% uh uplift on the ads uh Revenue so 26 million then plus like what 13 additional which not bad not bad and uh they're actually quite big in us and um and also South Korea and uh some Asian markets as well because I mean they're from there as well so I mean you can see

the the pattern as soon as you are from from that type part of the world you know like what you know what to do but what stood out to me was the appin uh pretty big one Google pretty big one Unity pretty big one they used quite a lot of playable ads uh which is great on networks and also why I think this works quite well is the visual style of the low poly basically which is very close to the hyper casual games and low always for me and the games that managed before resulted in really low CPI in comparison to other themes and and visual Styles so this is a combination of low CPI and idle which is also pretty low in comparison low CPI in comparison to other genres yeah and then if you double down on ad monetization and other us campaigns again like that's all like all free buckets which like ticks all on the low CPI side so that's why think like this works quite well and uh and also

what they did the company Sentry games they took Frozen City and then they put it into the wide out survival which is a basically a Forex game that they have and they took the Frozen City on boarding so it's all idle until the point where you actually play the game and then just got I think a level seven then it zooms out and you see the Forex map it's just so smooth it's it's it's amazing okay it's perfect so this was like let's call it I would say again P speculation very good taste to see how it scales and then it it worked well in terms of the CPI and retention the de game has really strong retention I think they one is like 60% they s around 30 which is not bad for idle games actually I mean back in the days when idle minor tyon was launched it was like rumored that it's like 70 to 80% they won now now we we don't know how they actually ranx for that but yeah that was the I actually I heard directly from the founders but nice so this yeah you never

know you never know so this was like a nice experiment like how to actually onboard players to the 4X because we know like 4X is pretty expensive and it's really hard to get players so like this is like like a whole story from launching Frozen City to actually launching wi out survival like after like two months the timing in terms of the December it's just not oh yeah let's talk about that it's not fortunate but again you think about it you have golden cohort right it's 26th of December so all the like e-commerce and all the [ __ ] which is pre Christmas right already like kind of Fades off and when does the App Store freeze uh it was before Christmas for two weeks but I not sure if that's that's the case anymore okay and even if if the that freeze like you have the well release build and can picturing doesn't matter anymore yeah yeah oh man it's like it's just it's zero I was like you have a bunch of downloads but the

revenue just stays flat at least on Google and I it's like maybe that does something but so in terms of timing it's not as bad I've even launched games in like 20 202 or 20th of December it's like again like the golden cord is always there and like if you power through the golden cord until January it's like actually like not bad timing okay so you you scale or start to grow the budgets from the end of December and then it kind of grow because January February is pretty good those are pretty good months overall for for UA so yeah good okay so maybe um those are all the five games maybe what we could do to wrap up is so in your opinion how would you rank these five games in terms of what you what you believe are the I don't know best performing or best for you but I I think we we have to uh Mount uh Hong Kai because it's just well it's it's just number one it's just number one number one number one yeah number

one so what's your two to five so two is definitely Survivor iio that's what I would say like definitely uh and then I I can't decide because it's very tricky in terms of the Monopoly go um but I would say frozen City Marvel St Monopoly go just because Monopoly go still pretty early and I think like that's way like that's not profitable okay yeah I would so we're similar uh obviously honai for me number one number two would be survivor.io uh number three I would say frozen City nice um then Monopoly go then stamp because I would say like Monopoly go because because I wouldn't put them fifth because we're still gonna see what happens yeah or they they will see what happens we can only speculate and then snap economics are kind of challenging but I'm I'm glad they were able to have a

good push and you know there're you know by the way you know uh love newers yeah you know snap seems like an awesome game and and we're definitely um rooting for them nice okay all right I think that's it perfect anything else than so much yeah all good thanks for listening bye everybody cheers byebye all right [Music]